WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
They say you should be careful what you wish for, because your wish might be granted. 'They' are correct. For the last few issues I've been complaining that the middle of the summer is always low on things to tell you about. This week I had more stories than I've ever had before to tell you about - and I'm exhausted (cue soulful violin music). It's also been a miserable wet summer so far, and no one can afford to go on holiday...
That being the case, I can only assume that the crooks here in England have been able to use their ill-gotten gains to go on holiday, since the police don't seem to have any criminals to catch. For instance, their latest escapade has been to seize a board game called 'War on Terror'!
The game comes complete with a balaclava with the word 'Evil' embroidered on it. The player designated as the 'evil empire' has wear this natty piece of haberdashery (I hope they wash it between games). The Kent police said they had confiscated the game because the balaclava "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act." I suspect the Kent police are lucky that you can't sue for aggravated crass stupidity...
Attention! Here is the obligatory Olympics bit. Lost in the furore about the CGI version of the opening fireworks was the fact that while the Olympic flame was being lit, the PC used to project the images around the stadium crashed, displaying the famous blue screen of death. The operators switched to a backup within a second or so, but those who recorded the ceremony can see it if they pause the recording at just the right spot!
Round Up 1: Copyrights and Patents
There was some excellent news from the US federal appeals court this week when the court overruled a lower court finding that breach of a free software license was not copyright infringement. The matter is important because it makes it clear that if you don't meet the requirements of a free software licence you can be sued for copyright infringement, which carries much stronger penalties than mere breach of contract.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080813-court-violating-copyleft-copyright-
infringement.html
Meanwhile the UK government is pushing for £50,000 (about US$90,000) for online copyright infringement. Somehow I suspect they weren't thinking of fining companies for breaching free software licenses when they proposed this!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/12/big_piracy_fine/
I see that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has backed off from its craven and cowardly attempt to use the DMCA to force YouTube to take down a video that criticised the Chinese government over its activities in Tibet. I guess that this is just goes to show that the IOC is nothing but a running dog of Chinese Imperialism :)
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/08/14/video-ioc-backs-dmca-take-down-
tibet-protest
More good news. The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) have been forced to cough up a grand total of US$107,951.03 to pay Tanya Andersen's lawyers fees, after falsely accusing her of pirating music. This, though, is just the start, because that just covers the lawyers' fees, next in line is Tanya Andersen suing the RIAA for their behaviour during their so-called investigation. Way to go!
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16724
News coming out of Germany indicates that the courts there are starting to get fed up with big media using litigation against consumers as part of their business plan. Prosecutors in the Nort-Rhine Westphalia area have indicated that they will only prosecute commercial thieves, and have defined exactly what they consider to be personal file-sharing - less than 3,000 songs, or less than 200 movies.
http://torrentfreak.com/sharing-2999-songs-199-movies-becomes-safe-in-
germany-080814/
The New Yorker has a fascinating piece on patents and just how many problems they cause in terms of things not done. Did you know, for instance, that in the early decades of the twentieth century it wasn't possible to build an airplane in the US because the patents on different bits were held by so many different people? It was only with the advent of the First World War that the US government forced the holders to put all their patents into a pool into which the royalties were paid and distributed. Makes you wonder what we are missing out on now because of software patents!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/08/11/080811ta_talk_surowiecki
And finally, here's something for lovers of early recorded music. For some time Chris Bolling has been digitising old 78rpm records and putting the resulting MP3s on his web site for all and sundry to download. He now has nearly 1,500 of them available, with more going up every week. The sound, of course is not exactly brilliant, but I guess that's part of the charm of listening to these old recordings.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/one-mans-quest.html
Round Up 2: Crime And Punishment
Finally some decisive action against those who don't look after confidential information here in the UK. Colchester University Hospital has sacked one of its managers who left a laptop, subsequently stolen, in his car while he was on holiday. The laptop contained personal details and treatment plans for several thousand patients - unencrypted.
That's great, and will make people think twice about what they take home on their laptops. As an encore, perhaps the head of IT should also be sacked for not mandating encryption of disk drives on all laptops...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/12/hospital_manager_lost_laptop_dismissal/
Unfortunately, the UK's Home Office, which managed to lose two CDs with the personal information on 3,000 seasonal workers, was not so decisive. They settled for a cosy talk with the contractors responsible for sending the unencrypted CDs through the post. Why didn't they just terminate the contract of the company involved? Come to that, why did it take the Home Office around five months to fess up to the loss?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/11/home_office_data_loss/
Of course, the UK government isn't alone in its lack of action. A report just out indicates that in spite of Internet fraud regularly topping consumer complaints lists, little is done by the state attorneys general. The report makes it clear that the states don't consider that the torrent of spam, phishing and fraudulent offers plaguing ordinary users of the Internet is a priority, or even a serious matter. Just wait till the elections come round and someone starts to campaign on it as an issue!
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBK6X0HiOOq0G4W0GZKy0E8
Back in the UK, the police have cracked a criminal gang involved in counterfeiting credit cards and harvesting PIN numbers, making it clear that the banks much touted 'security' system of making people use their PIN number instead of signatures is heading for a bust in the medium term.
Security researchers at Cambridge University have been warning about this for months, but the banks and credit card companies have chosen not to listen. I guess when you are losing trillions because of sub-prime and credit crunch problems, a few hundred million here and there is just petty cash.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/13/231816/gangs-have-
cracked-chip-and-pin-cards-say-police.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/pin_security_analysis/
Good news - over in Connecticut a man has been jailed for seven years for his part in a major phishing scam that targeted AOL members. The alarming thing, though, is that he was able to keep the scam going for four years (2002-6) before being caught. The man, Michael Dolan, was already on probation for hacking offences when the scam was carried out!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/14/aol_phisher_jailed/
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3453421/250590949/133039/0/
The UK government has a plan to stop all this Internet crime stuff - it's going to store everything we do online - yes, it plans to store a billion transactions a day, just to make sure it knows what we are doing! Here we are in the UK, heading for one of the worst, if not the worst downturn in the economy for 50 years, and what is our government's priority? Playing at emulating George Orwell's Big Brother. Stalin would have been very jealous.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/218052/government-proposes-internet-tracking.html
Round Up 3: The Phorm of Things to Come
Various US ISPs have admitted that they track behaviour without their customers' explicit consent. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been holding hearings into this issue, and this week they released some letters they'd received on the subject. There are a number of different technologies used including the 'deep packet inspection' which triggered the hearing.
Companies like Google, for instance, while denying that they use deep packet, nonetheless do track their customers (mainly using cookies, I suspect). To quote Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, Google, through its vast data collection and sophisticated tools, "...knows more about consumers than practically anyone...".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/
AR2008081102270_pf.html
In the meantime evidence is emerging that Phorm, a deep packet inspection firm, secretly tracked US citizens a year or two ago. Phorm is notorious in this country for running trials of its technology on British Telecom (BT) customers without obtaining permission of the customers first. In the US, Phorm (then called PageSense) apparently partnered with a couple of emerging WiFi providers to tout its technology. In the event nothing much came of it, although there are rumours that AT&T and Qwest were interested.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/phorm_us_tests/
Here in the UK, the fallout from the Phorm experiment continues to rumble on. Our regulator refused to take seriously the issue of people's private e-mail being read through deep packet inspection, much to the outrage of those who had complained. There the matter might have rested had it not come to the attention of the EU's rather combative Information Society and Media Directorate, who wrote to the UK government demanding to know why action was not taken under the UK implementation of the EU directive on wiretapping and communications data.
That was a month ago, and the UK's government hasn't yet provided an answer. Perhaps they hope that if they ignore the letter, the EU Commission will go away. Fat chance. At this rate the UK is likely to find itself up in front of the European Court of Justice trying to defend a completely indefensible position, copping a hefty fine, and being ordered to sort the mess out!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/12/eu_phorm_letter/
Shorts:
Here's a piece of interesting trivia. What common object celebrated the 120th anniversary of being granted a patent last Thursday (the 14th of August)? Five bonus points to anyone who gets it right. Give up? OK. It was the humble electric meter. Before it was invented there were all sorts of contraptions to figure out how much electricity you were using.
Edison, for instance, used an electrolytic jar with two zinc plates immersed in a zinc sulphate solution. The electricity flowing through the jar removed zinc from the positive plate and deposited it on the negative plate. Every month the 'meter reader' would take out the plates and weigh them to find out how much had been transferred between the plates! Great stuff. Point your browser at the URL for more details.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/08/dayintech_0814
Sever virtualization company VMware are reeling after providing a patch for their popular ESX virtualization software. It seems that there was a quality assurance failure which meant no one noticed that there was some code left in that shouldn't have been. The result - all VMware licenses expired this week! It's OK if you leave the machines running, but reboot or turn them off and you have no license.
This is serious, because VMware are the leaders in virtualization, and a massive amount of company critical software is running on their virtual machines. I don't think their customers are going to be very happy. Last I saw VMware were saying that it would be at least 36 hours before a patch to fix things could be issued, but I think they've fixed it now.
http://www.deploylinux.net/matt/2008/08/all-your-vms-belong-to-us.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/vmware_apologises_12_august_code/
There's a rather interesting case going on in Kansas City at the moment. Mathew Meeds has filed an anti-trust suite against Time Warner Cable and Time Warner Inc. because they insist he rent their cable box if he wants to watch premium channels. Meeds would rather buy a box from a manufacturer of his own choosing (and indeed who wouldn't?). His suit claims that by linking the provision of the premium cable service to the renting of the cable box, the companies have established an illegal tying arrangement.
This reminds me of the early days of networking in the UK when British Telecom (BT) wouldn't let you use a modem on their phone line (and they owned just about all the phone lines) unless they had certified it. Their certification process was arcane (a bit like those twisty mazes in early adventure games) and very expensive. Fortunately BT's scam came to an end when someone clever realised that there was no law stopping you -selling- uncertified modems, and that short of procuring a search warrant, BT had no way of finding out what modem you were using...
I'll be interested to see what happens in this case. Mr Meeds will, I expect , be up against some very stiff opposition, because if he wins it will make a nasty mess of the business case of some very powerful US corporations. I hope he, and his lawyers are prepared to take this all the way up to the Supreme Court!
http://www.kansascity.com/business/story/745876.html
I was absolutely devastated, devastated, dahling, to discover that Twitter is no longer sending out SMS updated in the UK. How on earth will I find out that the shape of the coffee grounds in someone's first cup of coffee of the morning looks like Linus Torvald's left big toe? The execrable Twitter appear to have originally overlooked the fact that here in Europe, unlike the US, the sender pays for SMS messages, not the recipient! Due diligence for social networking sites? Perish the thought.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/14/twitter_goes_silent/
And talking about social networking sites, I note that Facebook has apparently overtaken the venerable MySpace as the most popular social networking site. According to figures from comScore 132 million people visited Facebook in June while only 117.5 million visited MySpace.
What these figures really mean is moot, but if you want my take, what I think they mean is that half a dozen people have between them 132 million accounts on Facebook, but they only have 117.5 million accounts on MySpace.
http://www.physorg.com/news137907756.html
Coda: Updates to previous stories
A report from the 'Speed Matters' campaign suggests that it will take the US a hundred years to catch up with Japan's current download speeds - and presumably Japan will have moved on by then. This may be something of an exaggeration, given that Speed Matters is backed by the Communication Workers of America (CWA). No doubt the CWA have something of a vested interest in this issue. However, I don't doubt that the issues raised are important, and that the US is indeed well behind on download speeds. How could they be anything else given the far higher level of urbanisation of Japan?
http://you.presscue.com/story/us-internet-speeds-wont-catch-japan-100-years
MIT 'guru' Nick Negroponte took a hit this week as India took up the challenge to produce educational laptops for US$100 a pop. Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) was also supposed to cost less than US$100, but failed to make the price point. I wonder if India will learn the lessons of the OLPC failure to provide logistics backup and training for the putative users?
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2008/08/india_to_negroponte_drop_dead.html
The vote recount for Yahoo's board elections was portrayed as a solid victory for the existing board. Then came tales of a recount. Then the story vanished from the news. That's interesting, because it turns out that only half of the votes against each of the two key members of the board were counted! Once you do that, you can see that things were nothing like as rosy as they first appeared. Nice work if you can get it. I suggested any shareholders whose companies use the same election counters, Broadbridge Financial Solutions, should start asking some hard questions...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/yahoo-vote-recount-shows-how-close-
yang-and-bostock-were-to-being-ousted-from-the-board/
Anything to do with security for Windows has got to be a follow up! And this week Microsoft issued no less than 11 patches to fix 26 vulnerabilities - and 17 of the vulnerabilities are classed as critical. That's an awful lot, even for Microsoft.
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBK6X0HiOOq0G4W0GZKw0E6
Following on from last week's piece about DNA matches, I note that the Australian police have re-opened the cases on 7,000 DNA based convictions after admitting that their DNA evidence against a suspected double murder was completely wrong.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/08/dna_evidence_problems/
And finally, proving that judges can be just as stubborn as the next person when it comes to shutting stable doors, the judge in the MIT students not being allowed to discuss transit ticket hacking case has refused to lift the order. This is in spite of the fact that the whole thing is common knowledge in the rest of the US, and indeed most of the world.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/14/mbta_gag_order_remains/
Scanner: Other Stories
Olympics blue screen of death
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007443.html
'War on Terror' board game seized by police
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_news_home/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=338658
Google gives short thrift to Android developers' petition
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3453421/250590949/133037/0/
Recycled PCs despoil developing world
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/08/12/pcs_africa_recyling/
Air traffic control txting gets plane safely in to land
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0807/1218047756406_pf.html
Ryanair cancels aggregator-booked tickets in escalating scraping war
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/ryanair_screen_scraping_cancellations/
Google 'gadgets' called gateway for hackers
http://www.physorg.com/news137470554.html
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois
and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
17 August 2008
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html
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